> Also, the notion that racial slurs are "the price of admission" is something you seem to have brought up - not me
> Many see getting called slurs as a small price to pay to get a chance to break into tech.
I'm still having trouble believing anyone who isn't a frothing racist can pass off "many" getting called racial slurs on the job as just business as usual. Or, "a small price to pay."
Whereas what I was saying is that the policies which you cited incentivisng more diverse applicants to apply doesn't even begin to counter the ubiquitous prejudice in hiring and on the job. If it did, minorities and women would be over-represented in tech rather than under-represented.
The whole "minority free pass" idea is what grates on me. Plenty of hiring managers have unconscious biases against women, minorities, older candidates, people with disabilities, etc. So, it's throwing more diverse candidates into a situation where diverse candidates are going to be disproportionately rejected.
But the employers who actually incentivize diverse candidates are also frequently over-emphasized despite it being an uncommon practice. The boilerplate EEOC "we encourage diverse candidates to apply" statement is usually just that: an empty boilerplate put there for legal purposes, backed with zero action behind it. More often than not, it's nothing close to what you've described above
> I'm still having trouble believing anyone who isn't a frothing racist can pass off "many" getting called racial slurs on the job as just business as usual.
I don't think it's business as usual, and looking back on my comments I never wrote this. Again, the first one of us bring this up was you when you justified discrimination in hiring as a means to offset discrimination elsewhere. What I wrote was,
> But is the perspective of a white or asian man pursuing a coding boot-camp to try and break into tech going to have the same opinion on policies that greatly reduce or eliminate his chances of getting an interview as compared to if he was a woman or URM? Many see getting called slurs as a small price to pay to get a chance to break into tech.
that many white or Asian people struggling to get into tech see the employment opportunities conferred by diversity status as outweighing the other forms of discrimination that diverse workers may face - not that the latter is justified as "the price of admission".
> The whole "minority free pass" idea is what grates on me. Plenty of hiring managers have unconscious biases against women, minorities, older candidates, people with disabilities, etc. So, it's throwing more diverse candidates into a situation where diverse candidates are going to be disproportionately rejected. But the employers who actually incentivize diverse candidates are also frequently over-emphasized despite it being an uncommon practice. The boilerplate EEOC "we encourage diverse candidates to apply" statement is usually just that: an empty boilerplate put there for legal purposes, backed with zero action behind it. It's just usually nothing close to what you described above
First of all, it is a common practice at least as far as what I've experienced. Some companies, like Intel, went so far as withholding unless diversity quotas are met.
And second, if the hiring managers have biases then eliminate those biases. If a company suspects that biases are causing women, minorities, etc. to not get offers then excluding white and Asian men to pad the former's representation doesn't create an equal hiring process. It just creates a hiring process that discriminates against both women, URM and White and Asian candidates. Furthermore, while it's common to see people cite unconscious biases against women and URM candidates in tech hiring studies trying to actually measure this often don't find this suspected bias. In fact, they often find bias in favor of diverse candidates. Interviewing.io experimented with blind hiring and actually found a slight preference in favor of women [1]. Studies in university STEM faculty recruiting found a 2:1 bias in favor of women [2].
> Because that's a breath-takingly racist assertion. And I did not say that. I suggest re-reading your post so that you understand that you wrote those words.
Let's reread the sentence in context:
> But is the perspective of a white or asian man pursuing a coding boot-camp to try and break into tech going to have the same opinion on policies that greatly reduce or eliminate his chances of getting an interview as compared to if he was a woman or URM? Many see getting called slurs as a small price to pay to get a chance to break into tech.
Say you have two people in a coding boot camp. One is a woman, the other a white or asian man. They get the same scores and are just as capable. At my current and previous employers, only the former would get a chance to interview.
If the latter looked at this situation, and concluded that they would have better career opportunities if they were a woman - even if it meant additional discrimination in other forms, like being subject to slurs - then they're "breath-takingly racist"?
I'm also confused as to why you're calling me racist for pointing out the fact that many white and asian men feel like the tech industry's treatment towards them on the basis of race and gender is a net negative. Again, these are the opinions of people other than myself. The fact that you're exclusively quoted this sentence without the preceding one suggests that you either forgot this fact, or are deliberately attempting to conceal it.
> I'm referring to tech hiring in the private sector.
Good thing I cited a source studying hiring the private sector as well.
And I've heard hiring managers say racist and sexist comments on prospective employees all throughout my career. And neglect to mentor or promote them. And freeze them out of the team. I suppose the strawman you've set up outweighs the actual racist and sexist discrimination in hiring, which only seems to exist to you as some abstraction, rather than real people losing their livelihoods because of sexual harassment and racist bullying.
> Good thing I cited a source studying hiring the private sector as well.
Ah yes, the highly regarded International Journal of blog.interview.io. How did I miss this groundbreaking research?
What you call a strawman is exactly the kind of discrimination that exists at my current employer and at my previous employer. This is reality. And the discrimination isn't small or subtle. We're talking about aggregate 2-3x times less likely to get a phone interview as a diverse candidate. Is harassment or bullying equal to or greater than the impact of this preference in hiring? There's no right answer to this question, this is a subjective question for which people can and do give different answers. Someone whose diverse in tech might feel like a reduction in harassment or bullying would be worth a significant reduction in career opportunities. Someone who is struggling to get into tech, and doesn't have diversity status to stand out from the rest of the pack could also arrive at the answer that they'd be better off as diverse even if it did mean that they might be subject to additional harassment or bullying.
Calling the latter "frothing", "breath-takingly racist" is an incredibly hostile thing to say, and it makes me question whether people actually want to discuss the impact of discrimination in hiring or want to shut down discussion by making it taboo.
Also interviewing.io actually conducts interviews on a large scale, and is probably one of the best positioned organization to conduct this sort of experiment. Can you elaborate on why their study should not be accepted?
And you do realize that you're equating diverse hiring efforts with getting called racial slurs on the job, yes? Those are two very different definitions of "actual" racism. And rather supports the breathtakingly racist claim above.
> Can you elaborate on why their study should not be accepted?
Forgive me, I didn't realize they were the leading authority on the nuanced sociological facets of unconscious prejudice during hiring. And here I thought a publication by psychology researchers or African American Studies professors would be the subject matter experts to seek out, not a blog post.
> And you do realize that you're equating diverse hiring efforts with getting called racial slurs on the job, yes? Those are two very different definitions of "actual" racism.
Right, they are different. The latter makes people uncomfortable or alienated at their job. The former keeps people from getting jobs in the first place on the basis of race and gender.
Which one is more serious? Someone who gets bullied for their race at their workplace probably has a very different opinion on this than someone who can't get an interview because they aren't diverse. The proverbial grass is usually greener on the other side. Someone who's non-diverse and can't get a job in tech might look at a diverse worker talking about bullying at their job and think to them selves, "well, at least that have a job.". That doesn't mean they are racist. That means they have a perspective different than your own.
> Forgive me, I didn't realize they were subject matter experts on the nuanced sociological facets of unconscious prejudice during hiring. And here I thought psychology researchers or African American Studies professors would be the subject matter experts, not a blog.
This reads like a total non-sequitur. Interviewing.io compared non-anonymous interview performance of women to anonymous interview performance, and found that there was little discrepancy (in fact it found a slight positive bias in favor of women). Why are you referring to sociology and psychology in a study focused on anonymous vs. non-anonymous interview performance? Also, why would African American Studies relate to studying potential gender bias in hiring? It seems like you just assumed that this study was focused on black candidates, when in reality it was studying potential bias with respect to gender.
> So, you're saying racial slurs are better than diverse hiring?
I answered this question:
> Which one is more serious? Someone who gets bullied for their race at their workplace probably has a very different opinion on this than someone who can't get an interview because they aren't diverse. The proverbial grass is usually greener on the other side. Someone who's non-diverse and can't get a job in tech might look at a diverse worker talking about bullying at their job and think to them selves, "well, at least that have a job.". That doesn't mean they are racist. That means they have a perspective different than your own.
> Thanks for definitively putting the "Are you a racist?" question to rest. I think we're about done here.
This kind of rejection of different worldviews is the antithesis of inclusion. You're branding people as racist for looking at the world from a different perspective.
If you met an Asian man who graduated from a boot camp and failed to get phone interviews while his diverse peers got interviews and jobs, would you tell him to his face that he's racist if he thinks he's getting a short end of the stick? If he felt that having a job, even if it meant additional bullying or harassment, was better than not having a job at all would you genuinely tell him that being unemployed and Asian is better than being employed and black, female, or Latino?
Let me turn this question back to you:
> So, you're saying racial slurs are preferable to diverse hiring?
Between getting a tech job but being subject to racial slurs vs. not having a tech job at all, yes many people conclude that the former is the better outcome. I think the former is more disadvantageous. But I'm speaking from the privileged position of already having a tech job. People who don't have the security of already having a tech job often think differently. And it's not right for me to dismiss their views as racist for being different from mine.
Not to mention, non-diverse people are subject to slurs too. I've witnesses more hostility towards Asians than any other race, yet diversity hiring penalizes them hardest.
> This kind of rejection of different worldviews is the antithesis of inclusion.
Ah yes, the old "You're intolerant of our intolerance" chestnut. Every post of yours is just doubling down on insistently denying the realities of racial biases in hiring, and portraying any attempt to hire diverse candidates as the real racism. Oh, and look: more strawmen.
> Every post of yours is just doubling down on insistently glossing over the realities of racial biases in hiring by painting any attempt to hire diverse candidates as the real racism.
If this is your takeaway, then I don't think you've been getting the message that I've been trying to convey this whole time.
There are benefits and drawbacks of being diverse in tech. You correctly highlight that diverse workers are often subject to more bullying and harassment. On the other hand, many tech companies do discriminate in hiring and that results in greater opportunities being extended to diverse candidates as compared to non-diverse candidates. Both of these are "real racism" (and sexism). Which one is more impactful than the other? That's a subjective question, and people with different experience are going to have different responses.
Someone who is diverse and subject to bullying or harassment might think, if I weren't diverse I might have diminished career opportunities but it'd be worth it to avoid this harassment. By comparison, a non-diverse aspiring tech working might think, If I were diverse I might be subject to more harassment or bullying but the career opportunities would be worth it. Which one is right? They both are, because these are their opinions. Trying to say one is right is like trying to identify the correct flavor of ice cream.
And the "strawmen" are real diversity hiring polices I've encountered. If you're a boot camp grad and you applied to Dropbox between 2014 and 2019 you only got an interview if you were diverse. Dismissing the things I've personally witnessed as strawmen makes me think your opinion comes from a perspective that is not aware of the extent of diversity hiring. Perhaps you'd think differently if you worked at my current and past employers and witnesses our hiring policies.
> You correctly highlight that diverse workers are often subject to more bullying and harassment. On the other hand, many tech companies do discriminate in hiring and that results in greater opportunities being extended to diverse candidates as compared to non-diverse candidates. Both of these are "real racism" (and sexism). Which one is more impactful than the other? That's a subjective question, and people with different experience are going to have different responses.
It's actually pretty clear which of these has the greater impact. Hint: if it were the latter, women and minorities would be over-represented rather than underrepresented in tech. Which I've already stated above.
And, no, comparing racial slurs on the job to diverse hiring is not apples-to-apples, it's apples-to-clan-hooded-racist. There is no way you can be making that comparison in good faith. But do continue tell me how racist slurs and diverse hiring committees are basically the same thing...
> Hint: if it were the latter, women and minorities would be over-represented rather than underrepresented in tech.
They often are. At Dropbox women made up over 23% of tech roles in 2018 while recruiters estimated that the Bay Area average is 19.2%. That's an overrepresentation of ~20%. At my current employer, last year 50% of engineering hires were women - 2.5x the industry wide representation (though that was an anomaly - it usually averages ~30%).
> And, no, comparing racial slurs on the job to diverse hiring is not apples-to-apples, it's apples-to-clan-hooded-racist. There is no way you can be making that comparison in good faith. But do continue tell me how racist slurs and diverse hiring committees are basically the same thing...
At this point you seem to be offended by the notion that one can even try to compare the impact of racial or gendered slurs or harassment with denying White and Asian men employment opportunities on the basis of their race and gender. There's really nothing to say except that people will compare these two things regardless of your objections, and some of them reach the conclusion that the former outweighs the latter.
Overrepresentation of the population. Do I really need to explain how 23% compares to 50%?
And I'm offended because it's wildly offensive. You've repeatedly insisted racial slurs aren't so bad, and diverse hiring practices are somehow worse. And seem to think some amount of explanation on your part will make it seem like it's a reasonable stance instead of a deeply and reprehensibly racist one. Instead it just makes you look like a verbose clan leader.
> Overrepresentation of the population. Do I really need to explain how 23% compares to 50%?
So tech companies should strive to be 50% women even though the tech industry is only 20% female (or slightly less)? This would mean that women in tech have to be hired at 4x the rate as men in tech. Ultimately how you choose to frame equality is up to you, but I'm confident in saying that most would not consider a company that hires 50/50 men and women when the industry is made up 80/20 of men and women to be offering equal opportunity to men and women. It creates an outcome representative of the general population, but at the expense of creating massive inequality of opportunity within the tech industry itself.
> You've repeatedly insisted racial slurs aren't so bad, and diverse hiring practices are far worse.
Identify where I've said this? Because I've been very consistent in emphasizing that which is worse is a matter of perspective. In fact, I've specifically pointed out that it is not reasonable to say one is worse than the other because these are subjective judgements.
And lastly, trying to equate harboring different opinions on affirmative action in employment to being a leader in the KKK is really not called for. This is getting to the point where I'm convinced that this conversation is going nowhere.
> So tech companies should strive to be 50% women even though the tech industry is only 20% female (or slightly less)?
You seem to not understand what the term "representative" means. Or notice the circular logic implicit in your argument.
> Identify where I've said this?
You mean the last several posts of yours, where you've said it repeatedly, that you're now hilariously trying to backpeddle? You're welcome to re-read your posts. And the quotes I have of your posts, claiming racial slurs aren't so bad, and diverse hiring is worse.
> And lastly, trying to equate harboring different opinions on affirmative action in employment to being a leader in the KKK is really not called for.
It's not that the opinions you expressed are different, it's that they're repugnant. There's a difference.
> You seem to not understand what the term "representative" means.
So the answer is yes? Companies should strive to be 50/50 men and women tech roles even though the ratio in the workforce is 80/20? Representation is inherently relative, and that what I'm getting at here. Is your idea of an equal workplace one that is representative of the population (50/50 even though workforce is 80/20?) or one that is representative of the workforce (80/20 if the workforce is 80/20)? I know full well what representative means, but I'm asking you: representative with respect to what?
> You mean the last five posts of yours, where you've said it repeatedly, that you're now hilariously trying to backpeddle? You're welcome to re-read your posts. And the quotes I have of your posts, claiming racial slurs aren't so bad, and diverse hiring is worse.
Let's see:
> Who is getting the short or long end of the stick is not something I aim to answer, or even purport to be able to answer. This is a matter of perspective. I'm a Hispanic person that attended an elite university and have household names on my resume. I'd have a good chance of getting interviews regardless of my gender or ethnicity - and when you do take ethnicity into account it probably helps me even more. I'm largely indifferent towards this kind of discrimination in hiring. But is the perspective of a white or asian man pursuing a coding boot-camp to try and break into tech going to have the same opinion on policies that greatly reduce or eliminate his chances of getting an interview as compared to if he was a woman or URM? Many see getting called slurs as a small price to pay to get a chance to break into tech.
Here I explicitly say that I don't aim to answer whether one outweighs the other, and that people can find valid answers for either.
> There's no right answer to this question, this is a subjective question for which people can and do give different answers. Someone whose diverse in tech might feel like a reduction in harassment or bullying would be worth a significant reduction in career opportunities. Someone who is struggling to get into tech, and doesn't have diversity status to stand out from the rest of the pack could also arrive at the answer that they'd be better off as diverse even if it did mean that they might be subject to additional harassment or bullying.
Again, I point out that all I'm trying to convey is that there are people who think differently than you on this topic and that it's not valid to dismiss these perspectives as racist.
> Between getting a tech job but being subject to racial slurs vs. not having a tech job at all, yes many people conclude that the former is the better outcome. I think the former is more disadvantageous. But I'm speaking from the privileged position of already having a tech job. People who don't have the security of already having a tech job often think differently. And it's not right for me to dismiss their views as racist for being different from mine.
Here is the only instance where I actually state my personal opinion, which is actually agreeing with you.
> Someone who is diverse and subject to bullying or harassment might think, if I weren't diverse I might have diminished career opportunities but it'd be worth it to avoid this harassment. By comparison, a non-diverse aspiring tech working might think, If I were diverse I might be subject to more harassment or bullying but the career opportunities would be worth it. Which one is right? They both are, because these are their opinions. Trying to say one is right is like trying to identify the correct flavor of ice cream.
I think I've been very consistent in emphasizing that people with different lived experiences can arrive at different answers to these questions.
Weighting diversity against equal opportunity is something that this industry struggles to do effectively. We can't have a good faith discussion on this topic while simultaneously claiming that the notion that these policies create an environment that is more disadvantaging to non-diverse people as compared to diverse people is racist and likening people who think so to clansmen.
> So the answer is yes? Companies should strive to be 50/50 men and women tech roles even though the ratio in the workforce is 80/20?
The answer is: "No, I do not see the obvious circular logic." The tech sector is 80/20 due to hiring bias in the population that defines the workplace demographic. It could be 0% women and your fallacious argument would still conveniently hold.
And you follow that up with quotes of ...yourself. And commentary on your self-quoting. You don't seem to get that it's not that I don't comprehend your premise. It's that your premise, and by extension you, are being reprehensible and racist. You do not seem to understand that saying racist things is racist. And that you are racist. And reprehensible. For being so racist.
> The tech sector is 80/20 because of hiring bias in the population that defines the workplace demographic.
And evidence of that is...? Graduates in the fields of study that feed into the tech workforce are 80/20 - why do we conclude that the industry is biased when it is representative of the population that chooses to go into tech? A valid response is to say that men and women's choices of study are the product of a biased society that pushes men into tech and women into other fields. But at this point, what we're saying is that tech is representative of the workforce, and the workforce is representative of the people that choose to try and go into tech. This is not one, but two layers of indirection and many are not of the opinion that broader societal trends that produce unequal rates of men and women choosing to work in technology should be counteracted with discrimination in the workplace to push this representation towards parity.
You can say that "saying racist things is racist" all you want - my point is that putting opposition to affirmative action in the workplace under the category of racist informs me that your usage of the term "racist" largely equates to "people who have an opinion contrary to my own:, that discrimination in hiring is more disadvantageous than bullying or harassment in the workplace". This is a reductive strategy, and it's not unique to people who support diversity hiring. There are plenty of people who say, "discrimination on the basis of protected class like race and gender is illegal and racist - discrimination, regardless of the guise of 'diversity hiring' is reprehensible, full stop" and it's just as reductive. How would you respond to someone who said that quote to you? I'd probably write them off as being too entrenched in their view to have a meaningful exchange, and that is unfortunately the conclusion I'm left with here.
Actually, what you've been doing is already beyond bannable, and we've had to warn you more than once in the past. Please stop this and don't do anything like it on HN again.
> Yes, underrepresentation of the population is literally the definition of bias.
It's literally not.
Men account for 90% of convictions for homicide and other serious forms of violence in the US, and the overwhelming majority of countries abroad. Is that evidence of overwhelming misandry and bias in criminal justice? There's been demonstration of some bias, IIRC men tend to get 40-60% longer sentences. But that's nowhere near enough to account for this disparity. The reality is men do commit more violence than women and the disparity of men in prison for violence so this overrepresentation of men is not the product of bias, but rather men's own decisions.
Similarly, women make up the majority of professions like speech pathology, education, publishing with some of these over 90% female. Do we conclude that this is because of rampant bias against men? Perhaps, but in order to prove that we'd have to prove that these institutions prefer female applicants over male applicants. A non-bias explanation is that 90% of applicants are female, because 90% of people who want to go into these jobs are women.
Not only is underrepresentation not evidence of bias, the lack of underrepresentation does not absolve a group of bias. For instance, say a tech company decided it wanted to have an engineering workforce representative of the general population with respect to gender. 20% of the applications it gets are from women, so the company randomly throws away 75% of the male applications to make it so that an equal number of people go on to the phone screen, and subsequent on-site. This produces an engineering workforce that is perfectly representative of the population's gender distribution. But it is overwhelmingly biased against men and in favor of women. Obviously real-world tech companies are rarely this extreme - I've personally only seen OKRs calling for 33% at most. The point is, force equal or closer-to-equal outcomes in spite of unequal decisions made by people often entails the creation of bias, rather than its elimination. Do you really think that a company can achieve 50% women in tech without biasing their interview process in favor of women? The only company that even gets close to 50/50 practices explicit quota hiring:
Ultimately, at this point I think your conception that bias has a 1:1 relationship with representation relative to general population is fundamentally different from mine in a way that makes it difficult to productively explore the value of affirmative action in the hiring process.
> Many see getting called slurs as a small price to pay to get a chance to break into tech.
I'm still having trouble believing anyone who isn't a frothing racist can pass off "many" getting called racial slurs on the job as just business as usual. Or, "a small price to pay."
Whereas what I was saying is that the policies which you cited incentivisng more diverse applicants to apply doesn't even begin to counter the ubiquitous prejudice in hiring and on the job. If it did, minorities and women would be over-represented in tech rather than under-represented.
The whole "minority free pass" idea is what grates on me. Plenty of hiring managers have unconscious biases against women, minorities, older candidates, people with disabilities, etc. So, it's throwing more diverse candidates into a situation where diverse candidates are going to be disproportionately rejected.
But the employers who actually incentivize diverse candidates are also frequently over-emphasized despite it being an uncommon practice. The boilerplate EEOC "we encourage diverse candidates to apply" statement is usually just that: an empty boilerplate put there for legal purposes, backed with zero action behind it. More often than not, it's nothing close to what you've described above